Do you remember when Twitter lost $8 billion in just a few hours earlier this year? It was because of a web scraper, a tool companies use—as do many data reporters.
A web scraper is simply a computer program that reads the HTML code from webpages, and analyze it. With such a program, or “bot,” it’s possible to extract data and information from websites.
Let’s go back in time. Last April, Twitter was supposed to announce its trimestrial financial results once the stock markets c…